


On With The Motley

by Sapphy



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Injustice: Gods Among Us
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fatherhood, Gen, Kid Fic, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Motherhood, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 23:50:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4325571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/Sapphy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Harley hadn't sent her child to live with her sister? What if the baby had grown up with Joker as her father?</p><p> </p><p>(Basically a contrived excuse to write Joker interacting with a baby)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Send In The Clowns

**Author's Note:**

> This is a strange episodic little fic, and I don't know if or when it will ever be resolved. It was just an idea I wanted to get down on paper. If any of you want to join me in this strange little family, feel free to take the characters out to play.
> 
> Title is from an Aria from the Opera Pagliacci, Joker's favourite opera. Pagliacci, the crying clown, is an alternate name for the French Commedia Del'Arte character Pierrot.
> 
> WARNINGS: this story features Joker as a parent, and however much I'd like to pretend that could ever work out, I can't write Joker as anything other than he is, so there's going to be both emotional abuse and neglect in this story, and probably some violence as well. Harley knows J well enough to get her kid out of the way of the worst of it, but her concepts of what is and isn't acceptable are fragmented and unreliable, especially when it comes to Joker. If that's something that bothers you, you might find this a hard read. I will put warnings at the start of chapters so you can skip anything too squicky/triggering.

Medical personnel (apart from Harley, who’d been struck off a few months after her official supervillain debut) in his hideout was apparently a hard limit Joker was not prepared to cross, even for his heavily pregnant and increasingly irate girlfriend cum henchwoman. Instead, he offered her a choice – have the baby delivered by one of Gotham’s rogues (which gave her a choice of Hush or Hugo Strange) or allow herself to be captured.

And so, fittingly, the child of Arkham Asylum’s most notorious inmate is born in its medical bay, delivered by Doctor Arkham himself.

Her hair is an uninteresting dirty blond, but that only serves to make her eyes, the same unnatural acidic green as those of her father, even more noticeable.

Apart from her unusual appearance she’s otherwise a perfectly normal healthy child, though the nurses on duty all swear blind that the first sound she makes isn’t a cry, but laughter.


	2. A Rose By Any Other Name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: insulting/derogatory language used to a child too young to understand or be upset by it.

She doesn’t get a name for another two months. Her mother refuses to name her without her father, and Joker doesn’t get around to breaking his family out until the child can already sit up unsupported.

When he finally does it’s in a suitably dramatic blaze of glory for the scion of one of the most dangerous men in the world’s first escape. He strides out among the flames and the screams, his first born balanced on his hip, Harley trotting along behind, watching anxiously to make sure he doesn’t drop her.

She sits on her mother’s lap for the drive back to Joker’s latest hideout, green eyes wide and fascinated as she stares out at the city lights rushing past. (Not even the presence of a baby in the car is enough to persuade Joker to obey the speed limits.) She gurgles with sudden laughter when a pedestrian is forced to leap out of the way as Joker speeds thought a red light, and after a moment of shocked silence, her father joins in.

Back at the hideout, car put away (Joker has some of his goons drive it into the centre of the diamond district and set it alight), the first order of business is a name for the child.

“I can’t keep just calling her baby,” Harley says firmly. “She’s your daughter. Name her.”

“How about Killer?” Joker suggests, picking the child up so he can look her in the eye. “Or maybe ugly. Is there something wrong with it? Because it certainly didn’t get its looks from me.”

“She’s a baby, J. They all start out looking like that.”

“How about Winston?” Joker says, staring critically at his progeny. “It looks a bit like Churchill.” He gave the child a shake. “Or boring. Doesn’t it do anything?”

The baby, tired and confused and separated from its mother for the first time in its life, looks her father right in the eye and begins to howl.

Joker lets go of her to clap his hands over his ears, and she’s only saved from hitting the concrete floor headfirst by her mother’s quick reflexes.

“Be careful,” Harley scolds. “You’ll hurt her!”

Seeing that her mother is upset, the baby’s cries redouble, until the windows of the abandoned warehouse are shaking with the noise.

“How about Pierrot?” Joker suggests. He bends almost double so he’s face to face with the baby and chucks it under the chin. “What do you think, ugly? Are you daddy’s little crying clown?”

Abruptly the baby stops crying. She stares seriously at her father, and then slowly, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, she begins to grin. Fat pudgy hands catch and hold Joker’s long finger. “Blurp,” the newly christened Pierrot says, and begins to laugh.


	3. On Silent Wings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: mention of past casual low level violence to children, and what probably classes as emotional abuse. Despite that this is one of the fluffier chapters.

Pierrot, the name now shortened to just Ro, is a precocious child. It’s to be expected give her parents, an MD and a criminal mastermind, but her mother is still relieved when the child begins focussing at only a few days old. It was inevitable that there’d be some oddness inherited from her father. Better genius than madness.

She’s seven months when she says her first word, and in the grand tradition of Gotham’s Crime Clowns, it’s not what anyone expects. It’s not mama, or dada, or even Teddy.

It’s bat.

They’re taking a walk around Old Gotham, just the three of them. Joker is in one of his rare conciliatory moods, and instead of screaming back or throwing something at her when his daughter won’t stop crying, he suggests they take her out in the stroller in the hope that fresh air will lull her to sleep.

(There isn’t any fresh air to be had in Gotham, but Ro was just as fascinated by the light and noise of the city at six months as she had been when she’d first seen it).

They were just passing Crime Alley when Joker crowed with delight, stopping dead to stare up at the Bat signal, reflecting back off the cities ever present cloud cover.

Ro twisted in her seat to see what her father was looking at, her face breaking into a wide smile as she spotted it.

“Bat,” she said happily, drumming her heels against the stroller’s seat and pointing. “Mama, bat!”

(Harley was thrilled that her little girl was talking – and that her second word had been mama – and Joker didn’t stop laughing all the way home).


	4. Build God, Then We'll Talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pushing/shoving a child, who isn't hurt or upset by it

Ro sits on the floor, pudgy toddler legs stretched out in front of her, and surveys the brightly coloured building blocks with a serious expression.

After several minutes of silence, she rolls over onto her side with a small thump, and tugs the hand which is hanging over the edge of the sofa.

“Ma,” she says, and when that gets no response, “mama!”

Harley makes a small snorting noise, and rolls over, still firmly asleep.

Realising she won’t get any help from that quarter, she rolls back into a sitting position and bottom-shuffles toward to the desk where her father is working, city maps and newspaper clippings and a handful of inexplicable takeaway leaflets spread out in front of him.

She tugs at his trousers. “Da!”

Her father nudges her irritably with his foot, not quite a kick but enough to send her rocking back into a sitting position. She’s learnt persistence though, and had inherited her mother’s bull headedness, so she’s not put off.

“Da,” she says again, and then louder, “Daaaaaaaaaaaa.” He ignores her, but she’s not discourged. “Jaaaaaaaaaay.”

That works, and he puts down the paper and straight razor he’d been playing with while he read, and looks down at his small daughter.

“What do you want?”

“Dada, what?” she asks, pointing at the pile of bricks. “What?!”

“They’re building blocks, my underdeveloped spawn. One uses them to construct things.”

“Why?” It had been one of her first words, and would probably never stop being her favourite.

“So that, once constructed, you may revel in the destruction.”

“Why?”

Joker signed and stood, stretching out his neck with a crunch. “I suppose I’ll have to show you. No hope of you working it out yourself. You can’t even dress yourself.” He giggles at his joke, and Ro echoes him, not understanding but pleased that he’s playing her attention.

When Harley wakes up half an hour later, it’s by the enormous crash as Ro delightedly topples a tower taller than herself.

“I’m teaching her physics,” Joker says blandly.


	5. Cold Cold Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a time skip between this one and the last, which I'll probably fill in at this point. I figure Ro's about five here.
> 
> Warnings: discussion of emotional neglect and the reasons behind it with a child old enough to understand that this isn't normal. Mentions of the fears an outsider has for the child and mother.

“Anti Ay-vee,” the child says, from her position atop the lemon tree. Her accent is becoming a bizarre mix of her mother’s Brooklyn, a thick Gotham drawl she’s probably picked up from her father’s goons, and a strange uncertainty of pitch that’s pure Joker.

“Yes, Ro?”

“Why doesn’t daddy love me?”

Ivy freezes. Her first instinct is too lie, to tell the child comforting untruths, but she tries to be truthful with her honorary goddaughter, and anyway, that particular lie could end up getting Ro killed.

So instead she takes a minute to work out a child friendly way of explaining, as best as anyone can explain anything about Joker, and then lowers the branch down so she can look Ro in the eye.

“Everyone’s brains are different,” she explains. “Sometimes it’s little things, like liking different things from you, but sometimes it’s much bigger things. Some people’s brains work so differently, that they have different emotions. Your daddy is like that. He doesn’t love you, because he doesn’t feel love. His brain doesn’t work that way.”

Ro thinks about this, looking curious rather than distressed. “That’s very sad. Except, daddy doesn’t get sad, not really. He gets mad sometimes, and lots of the time when he laughs he doesn’t mean it, but he doesn’t really get sad.”

“No, he doesn’t.” Joker’s occasional bouts of melancholy never last more than a few moments, anything that someone else might experience as sadness being quickly sublimated into rage in the clown’s broken mind.

“Is it still okay for me to love him?”

No, Ivy wants to scream, never, you’ll end up in the same trap as Harley, but she doesn’t say it. Her words won’t matter. How is a child supposed to stop themselves from loving their parents? That’s something that can only happen organically, and Ivy prays that things never get that bad.

“Of course it is, daffodil. Just so long as you remember that he can’t feel the same way.”

“No,” Ro says sadly, “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments make my day. Even if it's just one word x


End file.
